Daily Times

Securitisation is an International Relations term that means conferring a special status on a subject by the state because of a looming threat of clear and present danger to the national security. The term that was coined by the famous International Relations theorist Ole Weaver has generally been used to indicate the importance of a subject to the national security. The subject of security and its object both are defined clearly to establish a relationship between the two. The object while securitising a subject like food could be the public that is threatened by famine and for the amelioration of whose lot the steps are taken to expend mental, moral, and material energies of the state on a war footing. When a subject or an issue is securitised,the state is mandated to take all necessary steps to protect that subject from the envisaged threat.If in order to ensure that protection certain personal liberties are curtailed the measure is deemed kosher.

As a security state, Pakistan has been beset with several external and internal threats resulting in the securitisation of foreign and internal security policies that scholars like Samuel Finer criticise as “The Man on The Horsepower” syndrome. As per Finer, “the armed forces have three massive political advantages over civilian organisations: a marked superiority in organisation, a highly emotionalised symbolic status, and a monopoly of arms.” Since because of these advantages the armed forces are better poised to securitise an issue, the weak civilian governance structures in Pakistan have been acting as magnets to praetorian interventions. In our hybrid democracy where the military still counts as a strong actor in the national power matrix, the civilian government has been conceding to military’s greater role in internal security as well as foreign policy. What the military has securitised has always been accorded a hallowed position in the pantheon of national security issues appropriating generous national attention in terms of ideological and material support.

While India can store enough water to last it three months, we can only store enough for 30 days

From above discourse, one concludes that any issue that eludes the civilian attention due to sheer complacency or the lack of national consensus could ideally be securitised by the attention lavished upon it by the military. A case in point is the war on terror that was not being fought with the requisite vigour until the military threw caution to the wind and entered North Waziristan to root out the presence of TTP militants and its allies. After terrorism, another scourge is raising its fearsome head in the shape of water scarcity for Pakistan. Pakistan’s burgeoning population, arid climate, and water profligacy threaten the food security of the country. Being an agricultural country, 96percent of the country’s water resources are utilised for the agriculture where 40percent of the water is being wasted due to antiquated and wasteful irrigation practices. According to Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR),if urgent steps are not taken the country would run dry by 2025.

We are wasting 35 million acre-feet (maf) of water annually to the sea due to lack of water storage facilities. While India possesses three months of water storage capacity, Pakistan only has a 30-day capacity. Due to population pressure, the subsurface water extraction has increased manifold resulting in depletion of subsurface fresh water aquifers of the country, an ominous development that should ring a few alarm bells in its own right. Due to lack of seriousness in developing water storage facilities India as an upper riparian has exploited the clauses of Indian Basin treaty adroitly, granting it limited use of our three Western rivers, to build storage facilities at the cost of water meant for Pakistan. The Kishan Ganga project is a case in point where Indians very cleverly diverted the water of River Kishan Ganga, known as Neelam in Pakistan, towards River Jehlum reducing the flow in the River Neelam in Azad Kashmir. Pakistan’s tardy start of the Neelum-Jehlum project and inordinate delay in the execution enabled India to establish first right on the waters of the River Kishan Ganga, an aspect the Court of the Arbitration of the World Bank’s ruling duly acknowledged in India’s favour.

Our egregiously flawed water policy has resulted in the poor pleading of the case without the water use statistics. In the latest attempt to get the neutral experts appointed for arbitration by the World Bank, Pakistan is banking on the technical issues of height and capacity of the dam, both of which have been settled in the first award by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in 2013. So the flawed policies, lack of seriousness, and politics have trumped water security resulting in a doomsday scenario on the waterfront for the country. A country that was water abundant (5047 cum per capita) in 1947 has become a water scarce country (850-900 cum per capita) in 2018. The 40percent reduction in water supply in this Kharif season portends the onset of a deadly drought. Pakistan’s inability to build large reservoirs after Tarbela and Mangla has resulted into the perennial water and power shortages alternated with devastating floods that could easily have been avoided had we constructed Kalabagh Dam.

Someone politicised the Kalabagh Dam, and the bickering provinces could not rise above their imaginary fears to forge a consensus for a dam that was ready for construction in 1987. Lobbies inimical to Pakistan poured money and resources liberally to derail the project, sending dithering Pakistani dam planners on a wild goose chase in difficult mountainous terrain for Bhasha and Dassu. Kalabagh Dam that can irrigate 20 lac acres of Indus Delta including 8.5 lac acres of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa can also store 6.4 maf for irrigation and is an ideal dam for harnessing the river flows from River Swat and Kabul. Sindh that would receive 2.275 maf for irrigation would be the biggest gainer due to the imminent danger of desertification on account of its depleted sub-surface water. It is time some national institution took the initiative and securitised the Kalabagh Dam Project. It is time the jinxed project is elevated to the level of a national security imperative.

It is only by securitising the construction of the dam that the issue will be snatched from the scheming and squabbling clutches of myopic politicians playing into the hands of external and internal detractors of the project. For far too long we have been securitising trifles. It is time an issue vital to the food security and human survival is elevated to the pedestal of a national security subject away from the polemics of provincial politics. If the dam is treated as a national security issue, then slowly and surely the entire national water policy would also be brought within its ambit removing it from the asphyxiating reach of the conniving sub-nationalists and the slothful bureaucrats. Who would act as the agent of change and the guarantor of the securitised project? It is a million-dollar question but not too difficult to answer. The change agent behind the scenes should be armed forces while the guarantor on the face should be the judiciary, a combo of the two institutions that are the last bastion of our water security and national survival.

The writer is a PhD scholar at NUST; rwjanj@hotmail.com

Published in Daily Times, June 4^th 2018.